Camps offer creative outlet Camps offer creative outlet (April 29, 2005)

By Kathy Schrenk

Nine-year-old Jared Eng wore a look of sheer glee as he pounded away with hammer and nail at the shelf he was constructing.

"Nailing" is Jared's favorite activity, by far. He likes "hitting," he says. Nailing is better than gluing, because gluing is "too sticky."

Meanwhile, despite the din, his fellow spring-break campers were busy working on the boxes, doll houses and rodent habitrails they were making at the Community School of Music and Arts' week-long camp.

The Mountain View non-profit held camps for elementary school kids during last week's spring break, giving kids a creative outlet and a safe place to learn and have fun while school was out. And for the third- through fifth-graders in instructor Pat Nyland's Construction Zone camp, the week meant learning how to use a saw, a hammer and even a carpenter's square.

"They get really good at it," Nyland said. "They realize pretty quick that things don't fit together if they're not square."

Nyland, a ceramics instructor at the school, teaches the kids the principals of a basic woodworking project from start to finish: tool safety, design and construction.

The kids used scraps of paper and Nyland's own equipment to build their projects. Jared made a relatively complex blue shelf constructed from two squares and mounted on a white background.

Sophia Horowitz, 11, made a jewelry box out of molding, cardboard and felt. The young artist had never used a hammer or saw before. "This is the first time I've worked with wood," she said.

She doesn't think it will be the last, either. A shelf might be her next project, she said.

It's easy to get the kids excited about the projects, Nyland said, because the skills and tools are often new to them. "The kids have something to do that they can't do at home," she said. The kids get so into their projects that many of them chose to work right through the mid-afternoon playground break.

At the school, camps for slightly younger kids focus on principles like drawing human faces. The youngest tykes - those around kindergarten age - have camps with themes like undersea creatures. There, the kids make light houses out of paper towel rolls and tea boxes and their own fishing games out of metal fish-shapes and magnetic "poles."

The classes are taught by instructors from the Community School of Music and Arts who also teach weekly art classes in local public schools. Those programs will have exhibits of student art at the schools in the next few weeks.

For more information about the community school, including summer camps, visit www.arts4all.org.
E-mail Kathy Schrenk at kschrenk@mv-voice.com

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